The Unheralded

The fans of the N.F.L.’s Baltimore Ravens are—and I can say this because I am one—a perpetually aggrieved bunch. The league is against us, the refs have it out for us, the commentators and announcers on television never give us our due. And don’t get us started on Paul Tagliabue, even though he has been retired from his post as commissioner of the N.F.L. for six years now.

I am, to be totally honest, not actually sure that any of these things are true. (Except the Tagliabue part.) But I do know that we have a new, legitimate reason to be upset with the football-watching community—hell, with the whole Internet.

For the past three years, Brendon Ayanbadejo, a backup linebacker and standout special-teams player for the Ravens, has been advocating for same-sex marriage—writing about it, talking about it, appearing as one of the stars of a video campaign launched by backers of a measure to legalize it in Maryland. It’s not his day job, but he’s gotten enough attention for it that an anti-gay-marriage Maryland state legislator wrote to the owner of the Ravens and demanded that he shut Ayanbadejo up.

Enter the Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe, who came to Ayanbadejo’s defense with a vitriolic but quite enjoyable rant published on the sports blog Deadspin. And now Ayanbadejo is no longer the story—sure, he’d done the harder work, but he never used the words “lustful cock-monster.” Admittedly, Ayanbadejo is still getting mentioned in the stories about the whole dustup, but a careful reader will see what’s going on—Kluwe is the lead of the story; Ayanbadejo only gets noticed when the writer stops to fill in the details. (For the record, Kluwe has done his own advocacy for same-sex marriage in his home state.)

You may think that this is the paranoia of the homer, a cry of bias from someone who’s just looking for reason to feel slighted. And you may be right.

But then can we at least feel aggrieved on behalf of the Ravens’ Joe Flacco, especially after the much maligned quarterback had the kind of breakout game that must finally silence his critics, if only for a little while? Though he is tied with the New Orleans Saints’ Drew Brees for the most wins since 2008, his rookie season, Flacco has long been the target of mockery—especially when he’s tried to claim a position in the upper echelon of N.F.L. quarterbacks. But on Monday night, against the Cincinnati Bengals, he showed that he deserves a place there.

It’s been easy to dismiss Flacco, despite his outsized win total, as a mere game manager—that is, someone whose job is just to step back and not lose the games that the Ravens’ defense (and star running back Ray Rice) would work on winning. But that was never Flacco’s fault.

Flacco’s rookie year was also Cam Cameron’s first season as the Ravens’ offensive coördinator. At the time, Cameron, who was coming off a 1-15 season as the Miami Dolphins’ head coach—his only season in that position—wasn’t in an enviable position. He had a rookie quarterback who’d played for a second-tier college, and no real receiving corps to speak of. But he did have a decent offensive line and three serviceable running backs. He looked at those backs, said, Screw it, I’ll use all of them, and then developed a three-headed monster of a running-back committee and built an offense around them. What resulted should probably not be termed creative—the idea of running the ball isn’t exactly a revelation—but it was interesting, varied, and unpredictable. Sometimes there were tricks. Once Cameron put the backup quarterback Troy Smith in the game along with Flacco. Flacco handed the ball off to Smith, who then passed the ball back to Flacco, who was streaking down the left sideline. The resulting catch would have gone for a touchdown had Flacco, the poor lanky bastard, not ended up tripping over his own feet in excitement.

But then, in ensuing seasons, Flacco matured and got new weapons, and it was time to take the quirks and the tricks out of the playbook. With that should have come more responsibility for Flacco, but Cameron never gave it to him. (The two men reportedly don’t get along well; maybe that’s the explanation.) Flacco was allowed to throw short dump-off passes over the middle to receivers who were never especially open, or to heave occasional deep passes to receivers who’d mostly have to fight their defenders for the ball. The results were unspectacular, and, outside of Baltimore, Flacco got the blame.

This preseason, the Ravens and the reporters who cover them were telling anyone who’d listen that things were going to be different. Flacco, under the guidance of the new quarterbacks coach Jim Caldwell—Peyton Manning’s former tutor—was getting his training wheels taken off, and he was playing better than ever before. Cameron and the Ravens were going to open up the playbook; they were going to use a no-huddle offense, giving Flacco some of the play-calling duties enjoyed by other top quarterbacks in the league. Very few people took them seriously: the Ravens had said something similar every year since Flacco’s sophomore campaign, the critics reminded people. Flacco had been terrible when he threw deep in 2011, they observed.

But there are certain things a team must do when its vaunted defense is beginning to show its age—when the star linebacker Ray Lewis, the face of the team since its inception, drops a significant amount of weight in an attempt to stop the game from passing him by, and in the process loses some of his ability to deal out what were once literally bone-breaking hits; when the Hall of Fame-bound safety Ed Reed, who seems to be contemplating retirement or a holdout or both every offseason now, breaks the record for interception return yards, but in the process strains a hamstring; when the team’s one consistent pass rusher, Terrell Suggs, the reigning N.F.L. Defensive Player of the Year, is out indefinitely with a torn Achilles’ tendon.

So when Flacco took the field on Monday night, the very first pass he threw was a deep strike—fifty-two yards. That he would be called upon to take a chance deep was not itself so unusual, but the execution of the play was a sign of what was to come. Flacco faked a handoff to Rice, and did so perfectly: though they should have known better, the Cincinnati Bengals’ defenders assigned to cover the middle of the field fell for it, and started to move in to stop the run, leaving receiver Torrey Smith open for Flacco to toss him a perfect strike. Later in the game, another, better example: Flacco brings his team to the line, sees something in the defense, and audibles to a different play. He takes the snap, fakes a pass to Smith, freezing the safety in place, and then threads the ball through two defenders and into the end zone, where he hits Anquan Boldin in stride. Touchdown. The announcers on television would tell you that the call should have been reversed, that Boldin didn’t complete his catch of the ball, but if we’re just evaluating Flacco, that’s not really the point: the throw—indeed, the whole play—was one of those minor miracles of athletics where something looks easy because the people executing it are just so good.

Flacco ended the game having completed twenty-one of twenty-nine passes—a rate of seventy-two per cent—for a total of two hundred and ninety-nine yards, and it would have been more if Rice hadn’t scored two touchdowns of his own and the Ravens hadn’t pulled their starters from the game when the score got embarrassing for the Bengals. And suddenly, all of Flacco’s critics were jumping on his bandwagon. Which is nice, but Flacco’s bound to have a bad game at some point this season—he’s always displayed a disturbingly Tony Romo-like ability to throw an interception or four just as he’s starting to look really good—and then they’ll likely jump right off again. Which is fine. If they didn’t, what would we have to be aggrieved about?

Photograph by Nick Wass/AP.

Alex Koppelman was a politics editor for newyorker.com from from 2011 to 2013.